Meta’s approach of ‘pay for your privacy’ is wrong

Many people here are conflating the idea of paying versus ads, whilst the discussion is about privacy instead.<p>There&#x27;s nothing wrong with charging money for a service or alternatively let them watch ads. The problem is that the ads are tracking ads. If they would be simple contextual ads (dynamic based on surrounding content), there would be no privacy violation and thus no issue.<p>I believe the EU direction is that when you decline tracking, it should have no meaningful impact on your experience. Because if that would be the case, there&#x27;s no real &quot;free consent&quot;. Again, declining tracking is not the same as declining ads. Privacy should not cost money to secure, it should be a default and is a basic human right.<p>Facebook obviously disagrees.

I remember when Facebook first came out. Someone told me, &quot;join this cool social network&quot;.<p>I was curious and took a look...at their privacy policy. After one reading, I closed the browser and never joined to this day.<p>What a horrible company. May they burn.

They run an expensive service! Ballpark their (hypothetical) “AWS costs” at the scale and latency at which they operate. Someone has to pay for it. If not the users, then the advertisers.<p>If the advertisers, Meta is going to be accountable to advertisers to an extent in terms of what they measure and report and that requires data. Is this even hard to understand??? If this were your service, you would have exactly the same two options to pay for it.<p>If you don’t like Meta or advertisers having data about you, don’t use Meta’s services!<p>Acting like there is some “human right to use Instagram on your own terms” is deeply mysterious to me. There isn’t. You know how the deal works. You get the service and they advertise to you.

YouTube premium allows watching content without ads for a similar price. It&#x27;s unlikely that they actually stop Google trackers for youtube premium users though so you pay and get no privacy benefit.<p>Assuming that a different content medium, Facebook actually implements a subscription that removes ads and trackers, that would be a win, wouldn&#x27;t it?

If anything I&#x27;d be shocked if they didn&#x27;t sell the data of those who paid. If you pay for Facebook you have more money than you know what to do with, the list of users who do so are the Glengarry leads that every sales org would desparately want.

Not using Facebook is free and protects your privacy. What Meta claims it does and does not do with it&#x27;s users data is unproveable.

Ha! Remember when Facebook had this motto on its login page: &quot;It&#x27;s free and always will be&quot;?<p>Of course, you either pay with money or with your data. But still it&#x27;s a bit ironic.

In the old days you had to pay the phone company for them to <i>not</i> list your full name, home address and phone number in the phone book that every household had.

I&#x27;m willing to pay, but what they&#x27;re asking is too much, given that it&#x27;s per account (FB and IG accounts are apparently not the same account). It seems very intentional, too. Even the way the in-app texts are constructed, it seems they really don&#x27;t want me to pay.

The law is what the courts say it is. Many German newspapers have gone with the &quot;we&#x27;re a paid service but we&#x27;ll offer it for free if you consent to tracking&quot; approach, which has so far held in the lower courts, but hasn&#x27;t (last time I checked) been decided in the equivalent of the Supreme Court, neither in Germany nor EU-wide. Facebook would be a good test case for this.<p>That said, if you run facebook in a separate browser profile or container, or even have a good tracker-blocking list and extension running and don&#x27;t let FB set third-party cookies, then it&#x27;s a lot harder for them to track you off the platform. You then just need to decide how much of your life you put on FB itself.

At the risk of stating the obvious:<p>- It’s fine to offer a paid service and an ad supported free tier.<p>- It’s not fine to always personalize ads; this should be opt in (with an option to withdraw consent at any time and without costs).

I&#x27;m surprised anyone actually believes that paying will mean that Meta doesn&#x27;t <i>collect</i> tracking data about you as opposed to flipping a bit in a database somewhere that says &quot;don&#x27;t <i>show</i> personalized ad content&quot;. The latter is simpler and gives Meta a nice profile to use for targeting ads if&#x2F;when you stop paying.

Does facebook actually sell data? I know you can run ads, but the suggested practice currently is to leave the ad interests open and let the algorithm figure out the best users for conversions.<p>Second, tracking likes and comments is required to offer the service you can&#x27;t show likes and comments without it.<p>And I bet that most of actually ad data is just weights in a neural network not even readable by humans.

Online versions of all German printed media do exactly the same, I wonder how it&#x27;s going to be different. And $10 a month is not that much of an unreasonable fee compared to EU price level.

I think I would pay if facebook could somehow _prove_ they don&#x27;t track me.<p>I don&#x27;t think they could do that. I, therefore, haven&#x27;t pay yet.

Are they intentionally conflating privacy with ads? They are still going to harvest your data either way.

I&#x27;m not entirely sure the article gets it right either.<p>You&#x27;re not paying to have your privacy respected. Your data will still be processed in the same way. You are paying to not have adverts.<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure that the Terms of Service are almost identical. You still will get binned into person of type x, y &amp; z. the only difference is that advertisers won&#x27;t see you.<p>Its not exactly adding +1 to privacy.<p><i>edit</i> the reason this gets around GDPR is that whilst your data is still being processed, the product is not being shared with third parties.

well, tuta&#x27;s business model seem to boil down to &quot;vendor lock in&quot;<p>I say this as a paying customer, but I&#x27;ll admit I haven&#x27;t decided how I feel about the new plans (as announced together with the name change) so maybe my opinion is outdated

well, tuta&#x27;s business model seem to boil down to &quot;vendor lock in&quot; (from my viewpoint, I pay for their service and I haven&#x27;t decided how I feel about the new plans so maybe my opinion is outdated)

I want Facebook to die. It is a terrible stain on humanity.

Major mental gymnastics.<p>If you want to use their products, either be served ads, pay to go ad free. Nothing special.

The ruling says &quot;if necessary...&quot;. This swings both ways: It is not necessary to charge, and also not possible, due to the GDPR.<p>Facebook can run ads, and support their business, and do it without profiling everyone.<p>Have free: non personalized ad supported. Have paid: no ads.<p>FB making it clear here that they really want and need your data.

The ruling says &quot;if necessary...&quot;. This swings both ways: It is not necessary to charge, and also not possible, due to the GDPR.<p>Faecbook can run ads, and support their business, and do it without profiling everyone.<p>Have free: non personalized ad supported. Have paid: no ads.<p>FB making it clear here that they really want and need your data.

Do Data Deletion Requests solve this issue under GDPR? Just keep sending them their way and let them deal with them.